A Cognitive Study On Chinese And English Middle Construction

Middle is termed so because it is regarded as a state in the middle between active voice and passive voice.With the active form expressing the passive meaning,the interface between syntax and semantics in middle sentences is complicated.The exploration for middles has always been full of heat and dispute since the first systematic study made by Keyser & Roeper.Cognitive Construction Grammar is frequently adopted in examinations of middles and shows a strong explanatory potential due to its unitary perspective towards language.However,to make it fully constructional,studies construction meaning,surface form and a cross-language cognitive construal remain to be furthered.The analysis on semantic nature is primarily conducted based on English Middle Construction,in which semantic aspects including genericity,modality,patient-subject responsibility,non-eventity and their relation are discussed.It is found that the essential semantic of middle is dispositional generic reading and a construction meaning which can represent all middles are generalized based on the finding.After that a surface form is proposed based on the cognitive interpretation of the correspondence between semantics and syntactic constituents in middle.Thus middle as a construction is established.In the analysis of Chinese Middle Construction the construction meaning and surface form are also proposed.After that a comparison between the two constructions is conducted constituent by constituent and the illustration is also provided towards result of comparison.Besides that,the notion inheritance link is introduced in the comparison,which also reflects the constructional perspective.The major limitation is that the research stays on synchronic level.Besides that,the comparison in terms of inheritance link is not specific enough.